R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

Are we all just Dark Age doctors, swearing by our leeches? We crave a greater science. We want to be proven wrong.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

An enlightened mind is not hoodwinked; it is not shut up in a gloomy prison till it thinks the walls of its dungeon the limits of the universe, and the reach of its own chain the outer verge of intelligence.

If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.

I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things.

Our brains are so conditioned through education, through religion, to think we are separate entities with separate souls and so on. We are not individuals at all. We are the result of thousands of years of human experience, human endeavor and struggle.

The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?

In my day we let the wolfswans incapable of birthing our young die. (Markus) Then it’s a good thing we’re in the twenty-first century and not the Dark Ages, isn’t it? (Fang)

I think that the world is really in very dark ages. In America this could have never been showed, we are even more lost over there than in Europe. We are very lost!

People who are able to do their own thinking should not allow others to do it for them.

In The 3rd Alternative, Stephen Covey urges us to chart a course beyond the suboptimal solutions to all our crises - beyond left and right, and beyond the many false choices in front of us. The 3rdAlternative is a wise and welcome echo of Einstein's warning that the problems we're facing today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.

I think there is going to be a large paradigm shift in a few years, and it could either be to a new age of enlightenment and unity and we'll be raised to a new level of consciousness, or it could be a return to a dark age of kings and mass, open oppression followed by a die-off of human culture.

I teach people to question their thinking, and this changes their world.

Thinking is always dangerous to the status quo. [...] The moment you start thinking, you'll want to change something.

The Republicans want to take us forward to the dark ages again ... when women were property that you could easily control, even trade if you wanted to. It's appalling we are having this debate in the 21st century.

Unfortunately, our existing traditional thinking habits insist that you must attack something and show it to be bad before you can suggest a change. It is more difficult to acknowledge that something is excellent and then to ask for change because although it is excellent, it is not enough.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain.

Learn to do your own thinking - don’t let other people do it for you!

The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.

Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think.

A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.

At the age of 18 I don't think that I thought very differently than I did at the age of 25. I think we instinctively have the knowledge and adapt the knowledge we need.

Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.